- Level: Elementary to Early intermediate
- Pages: White key majors – 52 pages; Black key majors – 52 pages; White key minors – 80 pages; Black key minors – 63 pages
- Format: PDF instant download
This Smart Scales Bundle is the scale curriculum you need to help students approach playing in all the keys without fear, while also helping them learn to play musically! In addition, this Smart Scales Bundle will help your students get the unique “feel” of each key under their fingers. E Major feels completely different from Ab Major! And D minor is a completely different experience than F Major!
We all know that just practicing scales mindlessly up and down the keyboard doesn’t lead to the beautiful execution of a scale. But it also does little to help students be comfortable with melodies that are not scales! So Smart Scales uses melodies, in each key and beautiful duets to help students play more musically and become comfortable with each unique key.
In addition, this Smart Scales Bundle contains a variety of different melodies in the same key, enabling your students to stay with the key long enough to actually achieve fluency. Students will develop familiarity with the most common musical motivic shapes and fingering in each new key. In addition, the teacher accompaniments in Smart Scales provide the rhythmic and harmonic context that traditional scale practice lacks, which subtly provides rhythmic support, encouragement and feedback.
Diane Hidy and other teachers have been using Smart Scales in her studio for years with great success. Read the reviews to learn what others teachers think and how they are using these in more ways that just teaching scales!
How Does the Smart Scales Bundle Work?
Each unit in each of the editions begins with one melody without key signature followed by the exact same melody printed with a key signature. This provides a wonderful opportunity to help students read and understand how key signatures work. But then after this page showing how the key signature works, each melody uses the key signature. The melodies are in compound meter to encourage both movement and moments of repose.
Diane Hidy recommends introducing a new Smart Scale a few weeks before you teach a piece in that key. By doing this, you’ll guarantee that your student already knows the key signature and the most typical melodic shapes before they try to use them. Since each scale has its own auditory flavor, kinesthetic feel, and associated muscle memory, learning some of these characteristics first will help make the new piece start off feeling less foreign.
Of course, you can continue to teach the playing of one octave scales. But you’ll find the Smart Scales Bundle is much more effective at helping students actually apply their scales. They’ll be able to play in key signatures much more quickly and effectively when you use Smart Scales.
Show Me a Demo of the Beautiful Music!
Here’s a beautiful demonstration of Diane Hidy using this with her student. This video features music from the White Key Majors, one of the editions you get in the Smart Scales Bundle. Note: in this video, they do not observe any of the repeats, but rather play through each line for demonstration purposes. You would not assign all of this music in one week!
What Does the Studio License Mean?
Smart Scales is delivered digitally (through your email receipt and in your online account) and is studio licensed. This means that you can print and use this resource for any student that you directly teach for your entire lifetime of teaching. The license only permits one teacher to use the resource. Any additional teacher wanting to use the resource for any reason (even within the same studio) must purchase their own studio license. You can charge students for the price of printing the pages, but you may not profit from or charge the student for the music (resale is prohibited).
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